I decided to write this diary after seeing
this comment get troll-rated merely for saying what I and many others have repeatedly said before; that the gay-marriage issue was too far too fast, and helped cost us the election.
The reply to this is always the same: "by that logic, we shouldn't have ended segregation in 1964 for fear of offending bigots. We have to stick up for what's right, not pander to bigots."
There is a flaw in this argument. It's that there was a ten year delay between the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
And what happened in those ten years?
- The Montgomery bus boycott.
- The Freedom Rides.
- The Greensboro sit-in, and hundreds of others.
- The March on Washington and the "I have a dream" speech.
- The Montgomery-Selma march.
- Martin Luther King's other famous speeches and writings: the Letter from Birmingham Jail, the "No, we are not satisfied" speech, etc.
- The dozens of other marches and protests in which activists were set upon by dogs, beaten, or even killed, but kept marching anyway, showing they would both risk their own lives and refuse to resort to violence themselves.
Civil rights activists knew they could not gain equality without persuading a significant bloc of the white population, until then almost entirely racist, that racism was wrong. They had to delegitimize racism as an idea.
Likewise, equality and marriage rights won't be possible as long as the overwhelming majority of heterosexuals think of homosexuality as perverse. Yes, that view is bigoted, but it is the upbringing most people have received. Any attempt to push same-sex marriage without changing the underlying public opinion will result in precisely the ugly backlash we have today.
Equality Alabama says on their website, "We seek spousal rights (not necessarily marriage) whereby a domestic partner has legal inherence rights and hospital visitation rights". Why do they make this concession? Because they know that, on issues like hospital visitation, adoption, inheritance, child custody, hate crimes, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, sodomy laws, and even civil unions, the public is persuadable. Add the word "marriage", and everything falls apart.